Iranian politics has always been precarious, and changing dictatorial regimes have flagrantly violated the most essential human rights. Iranian writers, novelists, and poets have often played crucial roles in demystifying these tyrannical forces and bringing to light their infringements on freedom. Recognizing the disruptive and liberating potential these writers can generate by speaking truth, the Islamic Republic of Iran has systematically silenced their powerful and dissenting voices. We remember the murders of the writer, poet, and critic Mohammad Mokhtari and the writer and translator Mohammad Ja’far Pouyandeh by the very conservative forces that have now gathered behind President Mahmoud Ahmadinezhad’s government. One could, perhaps, expect more deadly assaults on Iranian writers in the coming days, but many of these writers have also demonstrated immense courage in defending basic human freedoms.

Maryam Hooleh, a young Iranian Kurd and one of the most gifted poets of her generation who now lives in Sweden, is one of these writers who--for some time now--have turned into thorns in the side of the Iranian regime. The profoundly uninhibited and confrontational style of Hooleh’s poetry has daringly exposed the crude disregard of the Islamic regime for human life. It has also drawn attention to the bodies of women, the most manifest objects of repression by the regime. At the same time, this confrontational style can provide ammunition for a damaging assault on the mullahs’ regime.

Within Maryam Hooleh’s poetry, the entire cultural framework upheld by the Islamic Republic disintegrates. For one thing, Hooleh breaks out of the confines of a religiously laden masculine discourse and its deifying paraphernalia of state-sponsored female qualities such as “virtue,” and “shame.” Instead, her poetry overflows with an arsenal of scandalous obscenities that, at every opportunity, debunks the rigid morality of a theocratic patriarchy. In this sense, Hooleh’s world is animated by a carnivalesque sense that throws into disarray all autocratic religious rhetoric. Mikhail Bakhtin, in his monumental study of the oeuvres of Rabelais, entitled Rabelais and His World, celebrates the concept of carnivalbecause, in its evocation of a grotesque body and its affirmation of this body’s protuberances and apertures, it emancipates the body and allows it to outgrow itself. The body’s orifices are the passageways that connect it to the world and propel it to overcome the barriers that have separated the individual body from “the body of the world.” In other words, these orifices are points of entrance into the world and signposts of initiation into selfhood. As evidenced in this passage from her poem, “Kiosk of Damnation (Nietzsche in Kurdish Pants),” Hooleh’s poetry alternately weaves its texture through a string of allusions to her trampled gender and sexuality as it vividly conjures up the horrifying experience of being a woman in Iran:

“How do you expect me not to be the messianic Imam Zaman* I, who, to kill myself, Walk in a tank top and shorts In the street of the Taliban.”

Within this framework, in a poem such as “Kiosk of Damnation,” spitting and urinating perform a liberating function that, through an act of extroversion, effectively counteracts veils and chadors, the most evident emblems of the entombment of women within the confines of the Iranian theocracy:

“When the city square has lapped up the city along with the evening tea,The sugar cube of the people of gangrene Dense in its constipation,My spit-urine is eruptingWhere is the toilet?

The city square the bitterness of whose gas bursts the nails of laughterUp to the bone and the jaw, towards the heart, My spit-urine is eruptingWhere is the toilet?

The city square upon which Tehran is spatTehran roasted in the dross of sanctificationTehran clotted on a tomb called the Milky WayThat nurses the sweetness of an eternal death.I am explodingWhere is the toilet?”

By turning the material bodily lower stratum into a focal point, Hooleh engages in what Bakhtin calls “decrowning,” turning upside down the entire spiritual topography of a totalizing ideology. Theocracies like the Islamic Republic of Iran and some other countries in the Middle East have consolidated their hegemony by committing all their crimes in the name of the inviolable sanctity of a spiritual rule. In “Kiosk of Damnation,” Hooleh damagingly mocks and decrowns this hegemony as her communion with the outside world transpires through an explosion of spit and urine.

To a great extent, Maryam Hooleh fits Edward Said’s definition of the intellectual whose function is

“publicly to raise embarrassing questions, to confront orthodoxy and dogma (rather than produce them), to be someone who cannot easily be co-opted by governments or corporations, and whose raison d’être is to represent all those people and issues that are routinely forgotten or swept under the rug.”**

Said fondly summons the example of Bazarov in Ivan Turgenev’s Fathers and Sons whose “deeply confrontational intellect” upsets the status quo. Hooleh also displays a dauntingly impudent energy whose disorienting reverberations disrupt the Iranian autocratic social order as they shake its foundations to the core. Indeed, in her five years of exile in Sweden, she has waged a ceaseless war against the Islamic Republic of Iran, exposing its brutalities and dismissal of human rights at every turn in her poetry. In return, she has been repeatedly threatened with death by those she has offended. In this sense, Hooleh clearly fulfills the function of the intellectual since, to use Said’s words, her “whole being is staked on a critical sense” as she challenges “official narratives” and “justifications of power.”

According to Said, a crucial attribute of the intellectual is a willingness to voice her critique publicly; she is averse to all passivity. This notion of publicity (we have to understand this word in its Habermasiansense as total political participation) ties in neatly with Bakhtin’s view of the grotesque body that “does not know footlights.” The grotesque body in carnival always turns itself into a spectacle as it assumes a central participatory role in a particular event. In the same vein, Hooleh figures actively as a central character in the exaggerated spectacle of her poetry as she becomes engrossed in a dynamic interaction with concrete public affairs. Indeed, her central role as a deeply engaged intellectual converts her into an axis on which political tribulations of a country like Iran, with its leaders’ outright rejection of human rights and continual repression of their critics, play themselves out:

“I am not sure if it is the ace of spades or a dictator that hides in my pocket you knowhungry folks can hide anything in their pockets But the sounds of their missiles shrieking comes up from deep insidein place of coins and dry bread! my pocketsand the stench of the latrine and tear gashas seeped into my clothes so muchit makes lovemaking difficult.”

As an intellectual, Hooleh challenges an autocratic ideology that tries to homogenize Iran into a seamless totality. She defies the assimilating pull of this ideology with something akin to negative dialectics which, as Theodore Adorno holds, operates subversively to include within thought what is heterogeneous to it. Hooleh challenges the identity principle of this totalitarianism by asserting all that is excluded:

“Sitting in at a TV show or falling asleep in front of it.Does it matter where your chair is?I’m dozing off down here, you up there.You dream of delivering lashes, I dream of receiving them.The important thing is when you wake upyou don’t care to remember that you have been violatednor would you care to remember that you have done the violating.If you want the truth of it, breakfasts don’t help humans cure themselvesyou must think of a better lullaby for tonightotherwise we’ll both suffer a fall!”

The imminent danger of “crash[ing] together,” of which Hooleh speaks, is the terminus of the distressing path on which the Islamic Republic has taken Iranians. The only way out of this debacle is the establishment of an encompassing and inclusive vision of human rights, “a better lullaby for the night,” where all traces of injustice and discrimination disappear.

*Imam Zaman, also known as Mahdi, is the Messianic 12th Imam of Shi’ite Muslims who is believed to be in hiding and who will emerge in the future to rescue humanity. **Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual, New York, Pantheon, 1994

Maryam Houleh was born in Tehran in 1357. She started her work professionally when she was 13 years old. She traveled to Greece, Athens in 1376. An Iranian filmmaker who was resident of America produced a movie from her life and poems in 1379. Her first book (Kid never fly from my hands) was published by midland graphics publication in America in 1379 (January 2000). She has a book named in Athens, alleys that is her poems during one year living in Athens. This book was published in the form of censured in Iran by Mir Kasra publication. At this time she stroke in protest to censure and publication problems in Iran in Daneshjoo park in front of City Theater one of the most famous cultural centers of Iran for one month that many other poets joined her and their protest was headword of newspaper for periods but she couldn’t continue because of disease.

She published Bajaye Nefrin during her travel to Swed in invitation of women researches institution in June 2001 that this book has been published in Stockholm by Baran publication. In Athens alleys book recently published for the second time but this book isn’t a symbol of her works and is a selection of her poems between 77 and 78.

She became winner of annual scholarship of Ghalam institute. Now she lives in Swed and manage Mania internet site (professional site of poem) with Hooman Azizi. Two of her books have been published in Swed by Arzan publication that will be distributed before spring 1383. These two books named “Company Dawzakh” and “Jozam Moaser” are published in one volume as first notebook of her works. Second volume includes books named “Sadism” and “Shabikhoon Moajezeh”.